The Sodastream

A couple weeks ago Dianne and I were visiting Rookwood Commons to get some frozen yogurt at Yagööt – a favorite for Dianne. We were there during the day and decided to take a walk around the commons. One of my favorite stores to visit there is Sur La Table, a cooking store. We stopped in to look around and one item caught my eye. The sodastream (shown at right) is a unit that lets you carbonate your own water. I was drinking a lot of diet soda and the cans were piling up in our recycle bin. I also like sparkling water (San Pellegrino is my favorite), so the unit seemed like a great idea. Dianne knew it was over as soon as I saw it. It took me a couple minutes, but I made the impulse buy and picked up some diet root beer flavoring and fruit essence flavors.

It was one of the best impulse buys I’ve made in a long time! I use chilled, filtered water from our Brita pitcher to fill the bottles. Using near ice cold water makes the carbonation process more effective. You connect a bottle to the unit and open the carbon dioxide valve in short bursts until the release value kicks in at least three times. Remove the bottle and cap it until you use it. It only takes a minute! I usually keep one of the bottles as plain sparkling water and add some flavor to the other bottle. The diet root beer flavoring is pretty good and the fruits are good too, although adding a couple drops of lemon juice or lime juice (or both) works just fine too!

If you like sparkling water, I highly recommend the sodastream unit!

Organic Water Macros

The Macro Mondays group theme this past Monday was "organic water." They had done water before, so the organic clause was attached to eliminate any potable water -- or water you would typically drink.

One thought I had was a teardrop. Dianne kindly served as a model once again and supplied an eye. I put on a couple drops of water as a fake tear. She gave her best sad eye look. She was dealing with allergies and sneezing a lot so her eye is a little red and watery. That added to the effect. I bounced the flash off a white reflector in front of her face for the main light. A grazing flash from the left created a little shadow across the face.



The next shot was a shrub outside our place that has very waxy leaves. The rainwater beads up nicely on them. Since we didn't have any rain this weekend (contrary to the weather people that said we'd have showers) I had to use a spray bottle to mist the leaves. I chose a fairly bright flash and used a small aperture to make the background dark even though it was shot in the middle of a sunny day. After looking at some of the other photos in the pool, I think I would do it differently in the future. A grazing flash from above enhances the drops on the leaves.



As a final shot, on a whim I misted a spider web on some type of evergreen shrub near our place. The web suspended the drops nicely. I took the shot and then later noticed when processing it that all the big drops acted like little magnifying glasses and you can see the reflection of the shrub in each drop. It looks pretty cool, but I didn't think the photo was that great from a composition standpoint. I was pleasantly surprised to see this made it to #4 at one point on the Flickr Explore list of the top 500 photos of that day. You can see a larger version by clicking here.